EventBox: Check All of Your Social Networks in One App

There are a number of apps that allow you to update the Twitter stream and other apps that allow your Facebook friends to see what you're up to, and even more apps that download RSS feeds from your favorite blogs, but who wants to have two or three different apps open at the same time when one will do the job? If you're a Mac user, EventBox promises an easy, attractive, and feature-rich way to get all of your social media, whether it's all of the posts your friends make at Twitter, the photos they upload to Flickr, or the posts they've written on their blogs.

EventBox is in beta, but it's not free. The app will cost you $15 USD during the beta, and when the app exits beta the cost will go up to $30. It's difficult to imagine how the developers will sustain this considering there are several free apps that do some of the same things, but it's possible that people are willing to pay to have an app that does it all in one, easy to use interface.

The app connects to popular social networking and media services including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, and Identi.ca. The service also allows you to download feeds and subscriptions from Google Reader, or any other site with an RSS feed. Once you have the app installed, you log in to all of the services you want to use with your credentials for each service, and EventBox stores them so you can access them easier next time.

Visually, EventBox is stunning. The app looks native to OS X, and borrows the brushed aluminum look from other Mac OS applications. The full view looks a lot like Mail.app, where all of the categories and groups show up as folders on the left side of the window and the content of those folders is displayed on the right.

For Twitter, for example, your home screen is displayed by default, but you can view replies, direct messages, and favorites by clicking each folder. With Twitter, Identi.ca, and Facebook, you can respond to messages or make your own posts directly from the app. EventBox completely integrates with all of the supported services, so with Twitter you have the ability to retweet, favorite, or send a direct message, and with Facebook you can update your status and post photos of you and your friends.

EventBox also manages your social media and news services. Once you've logged in to Digg or Reddit, you can add categories of interest or just see all of the popular or hot news articles in each view. In Google Reader and RSS you can create and view categories to help you organize your feeds by topic, and then view them by topic.

The way EventBox handles Flickr on the other hand is particularly interesting. The app allows you to browse the photo streams of your friends in a very intuitive way, and even view slideshows in high resolution, right inside EventBox.

If you're working or don't want to be disturbed, you can use the EventBox heads-up display (HUD) to see all of the updates from all of your social networks and services in one scrolling view, using a semi-transparent window that streamlines the updates to take up less screen real estate and give you a quicker way to access all of your content.

EventBox is a Universal Binary, which means it runs on both Intel Macs and the older PowerPC-based Macs. It requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher to run. The app is designed to replace all of the others you're likely using to check your Twitter stream, update Facebook, post photos to Flickr, and read your RSS feeds. It does its job exceptionally well and with an eye towards presenting all of that information in a truly useful way. Time will only tell whether people are willing to pay for an app that replaces five or six free ones.

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